Basically he's saying that if the API is great you rarely need to read the implementation. To which: sure, in some blessed cases where the API was great to start with and nothing changed so you don't need to change the API or the implementation.
This is only (theoretically) true in the sense that if you build the perfect abstraction, you should not have to think too often about it.
Building good abstractions requires:
1. skill that is in relative terms rare in the profession;
2. enough experience with the problem domain that the abstraction provides the perfect balance between ease-of-use and flexibility as the context changes;
3. a dedicated individual or a small team who nurtures and gatekeeps the evolution of the abstraction obsessively.
For the other 99% of real world cases, the best you can do is try your best to build decent, not-too-leaky abstractions for the problem as you face it today, and the underlying code better be readable because you'll need to maintain it constantly, as will all kinds of other people in varying states of cluelessness.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation."
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
History is absolutely true, factually true at that. Facts are sometimes hard to come by, heck some facks of modern history are still classified, but that does not give people carte blanche to make up stuff as they go...
Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
And if he was driving recklessly that fact doesn’t change simply because the other driver also wasn’t paying attention and didn’t blame him for it. Past mistakes are also painful to remember but the best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the reality and then change what you need to in your character to make sure we don’t repeat them.
To some extent what you’re disagreeing about is linguistics. Is history the actual events that took place or our knowledge of events that took place. And to be honest, there’s also a question of whether there’sa difference because what we don’t know about the past might as will not have happened.
Is "the reality anyone knows" not also part of greater aggregate reality though (conflicting with reality is true), or is it an ontological component of something else?
“The famed Brazilian coffee owes its existence to Francisco de Mello Palheta, who was sent by the emperor to French Guiana to get coffee seedlings.”
Small nitpick: at this time Brazil was a Portuguese colony and the monarch was called King John V, not an “emperor”. Brazil only got an emperor when it became independent about one century later.
Why did Peter, the son of a Portuguese King ruling over territories spanning 4 continents, decided to call himself an Emperor when ruling over a single (albeit large!) territory? I don’t know, ego?
I think calling yourself emperor was all the rage at the time.
Prior to Napoleon and the dissolution of the HRE the Roman Empire was sort of still viewed as single and indivisible, it wasn’t a exactly a generic title (well.. at most there could be two legitimate ones).
But now you had the Emperor of the French, Emperor of Austria, Russia (prior to that), so why not Brazil? Since you’re establishing a new state anyway might as well pick the best available title.
I think there are also some connotations associated with the idea of Empire that implies greater centralization and control.
One thing that's fairly interesting is how the British did not allow their monarch to become an Emperor, because of the traditional liberties associated with English monarchy and parliament.
When Queen Victoria became Empress of India, parliament only consented to her becoming a Queen-Empress, not an Empress-Queen, to emphasize the fact that Britain was still a kingdom.
It was also arguably seen as a more “democratic” office by some. The imperial throne in the HRE or in the eastern empire was always technically non hereditary. Being at its root a republican title in a certain way.
Most of the comments here are assigning this as Plato's opinion.
I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed.
In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy.
Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.
I get that the prefix entered our lexicon from german, but frankly you don't have enough information to say that there is no relation. The city of Ur is 4000 years older than Old High German, and Ur has been used as a metaphor for the origin of things for thousands of years, even ancient Greece. You can't definitively say that the idea of Ur as an origin of civilization had no influence on german.
But in Old German, the prefix ir-/ur- meant "thoroughly", from Proto-Germanic uz-, meaning "out", ultimately from Proto-Indo-European úd-, meaning "outward"/"upward", which is also the origin of the English word "out", as well as the prefix "or-", as in "ordeal". Proto-Indo-European coexisted with Ur, and it doesn't really make sense that Ur would lead to the PIE prefix úd-.
> frankly you don't have enough information to say that there is no relation
I'm not a scholar of this subject. If there is good scholarship out there presenting good arguments in your direction I'll take it. I was just helping out a fellow that has a doubt with my best knowledge of the subject, which is not just a guess.
> has been used as a metaphor for the origin of things for thousands of years, even ancient Greece
Has it really? I'd love to see an example. Sure it's listed in the Bible along with a bunch of other place names, but as a metaphor for the origin of things?
Even if there are examples, I'd really love to see an etymological trace of how it would end up as a prefix. Was it used as such in ancient Greek? In Latin? Sounds like a folk etymology.
Yeah, on second glance I might be confusing some of my sources here. I can’t seem to find what I thought I was remembering.
Regardless, there seems to be a significant distinction between words using a concatenated ur prefix and those using a hyphenated ur-(noun) prefix. In this case, the usage does seem to imply an original language from which all others are derived, and the metaphor seems apt even if it is not historically accurate to say that’s where it came from.
